Rape can send survivors down a rabbit hole of fear and loneliness

By Nancy Donoval

Listening to NPR's recent series on campus rape, and the follow-up discussion on "Midmorning," I felt a combination of exhilaration and outrage. Exhilaration for what has changed since I was raped at age 19, and outrage that 31 years later so much is still the same.

First, the progress. My 19-year-old self could never have imagined that April would become Sexual Assault Awareness Month. When I was a college freshman in 1979, we didn't yet have words for date or acquaintance rape. Rapists were strangers in dark alleys, not trusted classmates or friends. It took me years to realize that what happened to me was rape, and neither the school counselor nor my family doctor knew to call it that either. You cannot heal -- nor fight -- what you haven't named.

However, campus rape remains all too common and, as these reports make clear, justice is rare. We may have the words but too little progress has been made in understanding the reality. As a society we still shy away from looking squarely at both the life-altering impact rape has on survivors and its appalling frequency.

Even after 31 years, there are still moments when the ground under my feet opens without warning and I fall into a rabbit hole darker and deeper and than Alice ever found herself in. The simplest things can trigger me: white Chevy Impalas (his car); cheese blintzes (his favorite food at IHOP); bright blue down jackets (what I was wearing that night). The power of these triggers has faded over the years but they can still take me by surprise. You just never know when someone you're with is going to order a cheese blintz.

One trigger I can see coming from a long way off is Good Friday. When I was a kid, I looked forward to Good Friday. It was the last Friday in Lent, almost time to hunt for chocolate eggs.

Then, when I was 19, Good Friday changed forever. For the longest time, I couldn't shake the feeling that the rape happened because I'd forgotten it was Good Friday and had eaten a hamburger at Wendy's. Maybe because I forgot Jesus at lunch, He forgot me that night. No matter how often I told myself that this kind of magical thinking was ridiculous, that the loving God I believed in would never exact that sort of punishment, it didn't stop me from years of obsessive Good Friday meal planning. Do I eat meat, to prove to myself that it wasn't my fault? Or do I not eat meat, to prove that I don't need to prove anything? The urge to try to change the past by controlling the present is a hard one to resist.

I no longer approach Good Friday afraid that the ground will open and I will end up back in that rabbit hole. But I remember how hard it was for so long, and I am still relieved when Easter has come and gone. A few years ago, I tried to detach the rape memory from Good Friday by looking up what date it fell on in 1979. A quick Google search told me I'd had the unluckiest Good Friday the 13th ever. So much for escaping magical thinking.

I am a storyteller by trade so, as my way to create change, I speak at colleges and do a one-woman show about my experiences as a survivor. I wanted to put a human face on rape. What surprised me most when I started telling my story was how many people came up to me afterward and whispered "Me too" in my ear. I knew in the abstract, from statistics, how common rape is, but there is nothing abstract about all the "Me Too's" I've collected over the years. The stories are all too concrete -- women, men, survivors of every age, including college students, with their pain still achingly fresh.

More shocking than the sheer number of "Me Too's" is how many I've heard from people I know. Dozens of colleagues, acquaintances, and close friends -- including a friend I've known since fifth grade. Recently, someone said to me, "I don't know anybody who is the victim of a violent crime," and I thought, "Yes you do. We all do."

Just as it is more common for the rapist to live down hall in the dorm than to be a stranger in an alley, rape survivors are not strangers either. They are our children, our parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents, our neighbors, coworkers and beloved friends. It is heartbreaking to realize that all those years I spent down in my rabbit hole I was surrounded by a forest of rabbit holes, each of us trapped in the dark, sure we were alone.

According to a National Institute of Justice report from 2005, on a campus of 10,000 students, as many as 350 women may be victims of sexual assault each year. If that many students on one campus -- on every campus -- were being hit by drunk drivers, what wouldn't we do to make them safe?

We have language now for this crime. My wish is that instead of letting our discomfort make us turn away from words like date rape, we somehow find the courage to turn toward them. How do we stop the action if we are afraid of the words? We must learn to be comfortable with the discomfort, to speak the hard stories and be willing to hear them -- as many as we have to, for as long as we have to -- until all the rabbit holes are empty, and there are no more "Me Too's."

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Nancy Donoval is a storyteller and humorist based in Minneapolis.

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